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Let's Meet

Let's Meet
by Gary Woods

With the iPad inexorably moving into the corporate world I thought it would be interesting to look at the way it's used in meetings where not everybody is in the same room. Probably the most popular product for this kind of remote meeting is Cisco's WebEx offering for iPad. This app lets users attend meetings using the whole iPad screen and provides Voice over IP audio capabilities. This full featured app allows everybody to share the content that's displayed in the meeting, see who the other attendees are and chat with other participants.

Another very popular piece of meeting software is from Adobe and is called Connect 8. The Connect Mobile app has a lot of the same features that the Cisco product has and it allows meeting attendees to rotate, pan and zoom to create customized views of the content.

The third offering I saw was called Fuze Meeting. The cool wrinkle with this application is that it makes it possible for the presenter to not only attend the meeting but to facilitate and lead the meeting presentation from the iPad. There's also a schedule and invite functionality about this software and it integrates well with Apple's Keynote as well as Microsoft's PowerPoint including displaying videos.

Cisco WebEx costs $49 per month with no contract obligation and Adobe has plans that range from $45 to $55 per month. Both apps require that the meeting presenter use a licensed copy of the score presentation software. Fuze meeting on the other hand costs $29 per month and requires only a free Fuze Meeting Account to make it work.